Culture Buddies

When we began our project, our original prompt was ‘How can libraries better help non-English speakers?’, and our area of focus was Queens Borough in New York City. In addition, we wanted our project to be a public interest technology, or a technology built entirely for the benefit of a general public. We thus sought to answer the question ‘Can Public Interest Technology be designed around this concept for libraries which have a history or welcoming immigrants?’.

With this in mind, we wanted to have a broad idea of solutions that already existed, to draw inspiration from and avoid designing a project that already exists. We identified two broad categories:

1. At the macro-level, Executive Order No. 120 (which required all civic/city-service agencies to be translatable into 170 supported dialects via telecommunications services) and Local Law 30 (which requires all city agencies to distribute documents into 10 designated languages) were the two biggest official policies adopted by the City of New York. To verify the extent to which these policies were put in effect, we measured the number of languages available on NYC websites
2. At the meso- and micro-level, hundreds of projects and technologies created by individual actors (e.g. the Queens Public Library, nongovernmental organizations, activists, or even corporations) already existed and contributed to alleviating language barriers. We in particular documented 3 existing public interest technologies seeking to address language barriers in New York (Transparent Language Online, the QPL’s website as a language aggregator, and Cell-Ed), and delved into the QPL’s language services.

At this stage, we had a general idea of the overarching challenge of language barriers through compiled statistics, and some of the services that already existed that sought to address it. We thus began to amplify our findings by seeking individual testimonies, whilst being careful of the PIT question “Is there an existing bias in the research?”. We recognized that, at this stage, we had to interview as many people as possible, from any background or age. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions that were imposed because of it, there was already biases in our research: we conducted most interviews remotely (by Zoom or by phone), thus 1) relied on personal networks to reach out to potential participants instead of having a random sample of interviewees, and 2) could only interview people who themselves had a phone or a way to conduct a remote interview. In an ideal world, we would have been able to place calls for interviews in QPL branches, or even conduct informal interviews with random patrons at a particular location. Nonetheless, we attempted to mitigate our biases by organizing some in-person interviews, and physically obtaining spatial information.

The insights we garnered from these first interviews were the following:

Librarians:

• Librarians all recognized the challenge of English for many communities and Queens, and were aware that many of them come to the QPL seeking language-related services (particularly ESOL classes and translation services);
• People who may not speak English well who come to the library often rely on bilingual library staff to translate;
• Librarians sometimes use Google translate if there are no bilingual library staff available;
• People “tend to look for both first language and English materials for respective children or even if they are participating in a library's English classes”;
• This tends to happen more when parents are by themselves because they often have their children translate for them or sometimes call relatives on the phone for translation assistance;

First- and second-generation immigrants:

• People are not aware of the laws, and consequently, their rights;
• First-generation immigrants often rely on their children to translate official documents or navigate important/complex processes;
• Library access is “limited” for people that do not speak English;
• Second-generation immigrants often bear the burden of translating for their parents from an early age;
• Even when resources are available at libraries, immigrant parents still rely on their children for translation support;
• There is a lack of cross-generational engagement at libraries;
• There are few resources for second-generation immigrants to learn their mother tongue;

Here is an example of a persona we designed and a user journey map, for two of the interviewees we had the chance to discuss with:

The public interest technology question that recurrently appeared during this first research phase was “Who is being included or excluded?”. We previously mentioned that bias was an inevitable component of our project because of research methodologies and exogenous circumstances. In addition to that bias, we realized that language barriers are not restricted to one particular population, but is present for people who, for instance:

• May be wealthy, or impoverished;
• Could be a teenager, a mother of four, or a first generation grandfather;
• May have just arrived in Queens, or have lived there for a long time;
• May or may not know how to use language tools like a computer or Google Translate;
• May or may not have access to the Queens’ Public Library or its services;
• May or may not know about particular services offered either at the QPL or elsewhere;
• May or may not have an Internet connection;

During our interviews, we realized that whatever project we ended up designing, we would inevitably include certain populations, and exclude others. Whilst it was a difficult realization (as we all took on this project with the goal of helping as many as we can), once we began working with this barrier in mind, we not only better tailored our interviews to try and understand our participants’ capacity to potentially be part of our project, but also critically thought about how best we could bring a technology forward, even if only to certain people.

After analysing the insights garnered in the research process, the first step we took to narrow down the field we wanted to focus on was to select the main themes of needs and opportunities that arose from our research and find previous solutions that attempted to address these gaps.

We realized that the library and the New Americans Program had already put lots of effort trying to provide accessibility for low income families, developing programs to assist inmigration issues and providing language services through platforms such as Language Line or Travis Touch, for example.

Although the variety and diversity of events and cultural activities offered at the QPL is rich and varied, we detected that it was necessary to put more effort in the integration of culture within language services, bridging the intergenerational gap and improving the outreach strategies about the existing services.

Some of the evidences that helped us define the focus of our work are the following emotions expressed by the community:

We understood that the integration of culture within the programs offered at QPL was a key factor that would promote not only intergenerational exchanges at the library, but also among different communities, and also will prevent community isolation. Additionally, we wanted to find a way in which we could also provide a more effective way of reaching the community while offering them the possibility to suggest events and activities. Therefore, the questions that guided the next steps of our work were the following ones:

1. How might we simultaneously integrate immigrants into local culture and civic culture while preserving and sharing their own?


2. How might we enable specific communities to propose an event and simultaneously communicate and facilitate participation?


3. How might we reduce the intergenerational gap between first- and second-generation immigrants?

During the ideation process we came up with a flood of ideas on how to address each of our questions, and elaborated mindmaps to organize them:

The next step of the process was to narrow down to 5 ideas for each of the questions we wanted to address. After narrowing down to 5 ideas, the most interesting ones we had were:

In an attempt to integrate immigrants into local culture and civic culture while preserving and sharing their own, we ideated the tandem platform, an application where people could offer their help for bureaucracy and immigrants can offer language lessons.

To enable specific communities to propose an event and simultaneously communicate and facilitate participation we thought of an application for event submissions and advertising that would look like Uber Eats but for events, partnering with the New Americans Program.

Finally, we detected that the third HMW, addressing the intergenerational gap, could be solved by the integration of culture in the first question, and that we could combine the two most exciting ideas to produce a more complete and sophisticated solution. During the process, the most important question that influenced our design has been how we can develop a tool that can touch on multiple generations and address larger societal issues without leaving any vulnerable groups behind.

While synthesizing our research and progressing through the ideation process, we placed a lot of consideration on the question, “What facets of the larger problem are being overlooked?” First, we recognized that our two ideas required Internet access, which excluded many parts of the community who may not necessarily have access to it. Additionally, we noted that when doing community outreach, it is difficult to reach many populations because the people doing outreach don’t always know the best ways to reach the communities they are trying to reach while making members of those communities feel comfortable and willing to interact, especially if they are not part of those communities themselves. With these facets of the larger problem in mind, we tried to think of strategies that could connect our project to the physical world in order to come up with a public interest solution.

We had multiple low fidelity prototypes to begin with, including a database of activity providers for QPL, a tandem mutual-aid platform, an event-organizing app for the community, and a localized marketing toolkit.

Low-fidelity prototype #1: the Culture Bridge Platform, a database of activity providers for QPL.

We came up with this prototype after a conversation with Yang Zing, the QPL Flushing Branch Director, who told us about Culture Bridge Program:

Low-fidelity prototype #2: the Tandem Mutual Aid Platform

PIT Considerations: We asked ourselves, "Have we identified the questions and risks most relevant to the chosen technology?". For this tandem mutual aid platform, we asked ourselves, How do we keep the platform very simple and user friendly? How do we incentivize people to volunteer their time? How do we make sure that there are no fake requests/volunteer profiles? What do we scope it to? How do we not burden the library and its staff in making this facilitation happen? These questions helped later guide our design decisions.

Low-fidelity prototype #3: Events App, create and submit events

PIT Considerations: Again, we evaluated some of the risks that accompanied this events app, which included risks on both the institutional side (the library’s side) and the user side. Some of the risks on the institutional side were that the library could reject to do “extra work”, such as approving and moderating additional events, and that they could also reject the idea of advertising of other events that take place outside the library, especially at local businesses. Some of the risks we assessed on the user side included the facts that people not comfortable using applications will have a barrier, and the “approval” requirement may force the library to develop policies related to its criteria, since some users may feel “unfairly rejected”. Again, we used these risks to help guide our future design decisions.

Low-fidelity prototype #4: Localized Marketing Toolkit

PIT Considerations: Some of the questions and risks we identified relating to this localized marketing toolkit were: How will we get local businesses to use the app in the first place? How much compensation must we give to local businesses? How will we measure success in event recruitment by local businesses? How will we allow event participants to suggest their own events? How will we allow event participants to give feedback on events? We kept these questions in mind when moving forward with the prototyping stage and deciding on a single prototype.

Moving forward

Despite having four low-fidelity prototypes, we eventually decided to combine the events app with the tandem platform as well as integrating the database of activity providers after getting feedback to do so, as there was co-existing synergy between getting help/offering help to the community and creating community participation in events.